Dave Caolo

CNN Money:

“A rough three-day estimate, based on an analysis of order numbers: 152,000 units.”

Remember, this is for a device that the vast majority of customers have never even seen.

I’ve never gotten much use out of notes on the iPhone because I dislike typing more than a few words on it. I’m slower with it than I am with a full-sized keyboard which is frustrating. Plus, the bundled Notes app syncs with Mail, which makes no sense at all.

Now that I’m using the combination of Notational Velocity, SimpleText and WriteRoom, my iPhone is full of easily-accessed, useful notes that I wrote on my Mac and transferred with no effort. Here’s how it works.

Notational Velocity is designed to create, store and retrieve notes. Its marquee feature is modeless operation. There’s no difference between searching for a note, browsing a note or creating one. It’s extremely fast and efficient.

WriterRoom is a full-screen text editor for the Mac and iPhone/iPod touch. It works well, but I’m really using it just to display notes.

SimpleText brings the two together. It’s a sync service originally created to let Taskpaper and WriteRoom users sync documents. Fortunately, it works with Notational Velocity, too.

Here’s how to set it up.

1. Open Notational Velocity Preferences
2. Open “Notes” preference pane
3. Select SimpleText’s folder for “Read notes from folder”
4. Under storage, select ”Storage and read notes on disk as Plain Text Files”

That’s it. Now every note created in Notational Velocity is instantly synced with WriteRoom and vice versa. It’s simple, it costs all of $4.99 to set up (the price of WriteRoom) and it “just works.”

There are boxes of these in my basement. My family history is slowly deteriorating (Yes, that’s my mother’s handwriting). I must devise a way to digitize it.

My TUAW colleague Sang Tang took the first iPad ad apart, frame-by-frame, and determined how much screen time was allocated to each function. Awesome. Go and see the full chart.

Steve and the iPad both appeared on TV during last night’s Oscar awards. The ad (above) simply demonstrates what the iPad can do from a first-person perspective. Perfect.

You’ll remember that the first iPhone ad also aired during an Academy Awards ceremony.

When you want to attend the Oscars, and your name is Steve Jobs, someone’s able to make that happen.

I find that I “flick” my iPhone screen — dragging the UI of certain apps to the bottom just to let them pop up again — just for something to do. For example, when I’m waiting for Mobile Safari to load a page or Twitterrific to load some tweets, I’ll flick the page.

Tweetie is the only app I know that makes use of it. More should, as I’m sure I’m not the only one who does this.

The fun of toy cameras is in the light leaks, deceptive viewfinder, over saturated (or muted) colors and the whole unpredictability of it all. I’ve got a Holga and a few throw-aways that I enjoy using, but they aren’t always with me. My iPhone is, however. If only it could mimic those cameras.

Hipstamatic comes very close. I spent this morning shooting with it, playing with the included lenses, films and flashes, with pleasing results. Check out the photos below for a sample.

A full review is coming next week.

Hipstamatic User Interface Demo from Synthetic on Vimeo.

I came across Hipstamatic for iPhone today and was immediately smitten. I’ll spend a lot of time with it this weekend and review it on TUAW next week.

If you saw my earlier post about determining which apps will live on my iPhone’s home screen, Survivor-style, you might be wondering where the result post is. It was initially delayed by Macworld Expo (note to self: Don’t start a project prior to leaving the state for a week), but now I’m ready for the reveal. And the exciting follow-up announcement.

I’m very happy to announce that it’s at First & 20. I’m thrilled to be a part of that project. So … go see who won!